The Mediterranean, 2010. As rebels battle loyalists, Farid and his mother flee the wreckage of Tripoli for the coast, pinning their hopes on a trafficker’s rusting boat and the perilous crossing to Italy. Across the water, in Sicily, 18-year-old Vito has been raised on stories of a Libya he has never known, his mother one of the Italians exiled when Gaddafi came to power. He ponders where he belongs and what to make of his life as he picks through the flotsam of past shipwrecks that wash up upon the shore. These lives kept apart by the sea at their centre are narrated in sparse and sensuous prose in Mazzantini’s important, timely novel. Against a portrait of two mothers’ love for their sons, it tells the story of humanity’s constant flux and the forces that drive migrations. Home is never fixed, but a fluid and precarious concept that could at any time be upturned.
